When a Jane Austen fanatic, such as myself, goes to see a movie imagining what the real Jane Austen was like, well she enters the theater with both excitement and fear.
What will she find? How can she separate the Jane she knows and created in her own mind from the Jane played by Anne Hathaway on screen?
Well, the experience wasn't as jarring as it could have been. I was able to keep my own image of Jane safely maintained and enjoyed this movie-screen version of Jane (a totally different one than the one I know)-- way too passionate, way too pretty, and way too love-struck teenager.
Apart from this disconnect, I enjoyed the movie. I liked the lovely scenery, the snippets of scenes from Jane Austen's novels, and the sassy and sexy talking Tom LeFroy played by James McAvoy, last seen in the Last King of Scotland. He didn't seem like any kind of Jane Austen hero that I ever knew but what the hey.
Don't get me started on the implausibilities in Becoming Jane because I could go on -- about a weird parental scene at the beginning of the movie, or virulent boxing, or the cricket playing Jane, or writing Pride and Prejudice in a night on so forth. But I will spare you.
All in all, my Jane, still in tact, Anne Hathaway's Jane, cute and ultimately not that memorable.
